Assessment, Learning & Teaching Reflections |
Wednesday 23rd November
Power Sound-Bites: sounds like the worst kind of American sales-speak doesn’t it? The idea is taken from “Presentation S.O.S.” by Mark Wiskup. Power Sound-Bites are about developing or articulating a central connecting theme and making it the heartbeat of the lecture. It is a way of boiling down the material to two or three sentences that really sum up what the whole session is about. You then ensure that those sentences are repeated regularly so that students go away with them ringing in their ears.
Defining the Power Sound-Bite and honing it into a reasonably snappy summary takes some work, but once you have established the core issue or idea that the lecture is about, you can use it to establish a clear line of view through the lecture content. You can sort out what is central, and what, whilst interesting or diverting, is really irrelevant. I tried it on some of my better material. The results were surprising. With my new Power Sound Bite lens in place I could see at once that at least a third of the material was actually counter-productive in supporting the central argument. It may sound weird but I found it useful. Try it!
John Smith
School of Accounting and Financial Services, Faculty of Business and Law
